Stealing Light

Ten

Trans-Jovian Space, Mesa Verde

As far as Josef Marados was concerned, the Piri Reis would be scrapped and reduced to its essential components within forty-eight hours of her boarding the Freehold frigate Hyperion. But then Dakota had made some enquiries of Mesa Verde’s stacks, and found that the type of vessel used by the Freehold had an overall cargo capacity of one hundred and eighty thousand cubic metres-allowing more than enough room to hide something the size of her little ship.

Even better, the Hyperion itself was old, the ageing military legacy of a backwater colony. Subverting its security systems surely couldn’t be that difficult.

While she worked desperately on finding a way to keep the Piri intact, she had it display streaming news reports, the bright logo of the Ceres News Service flashing endlessly within the cramped space of the command module. They were still running images of Bourdain’s Rock disintegrating into gravel.

The news services on Ceres were airing a series of back-to-back interviews with anyone who had the remotest connection with Bourdain’s Rock. To her horror, at one point a commentator raised the possibility that the Rock had been destroyed by a rogue machine-head, someone programmed to infiltrate the asteroid and then destroy it.

Security clampdowns were being enforced system-wide, and it became rapidly clear to Dakota how lucky she had been to get inside Mesa Verde at all. Only a few days ago, the scale of the disaster hadn’t been fully absorbed, but now, the entire outer solar system was at a state of high alert.

It was a reminder, as if she needed one, of how badly she needed to get herself very far away, and very fast.

Ready, Piri?

‹All details are logged as planned.›

As she left the Piri Reis, probably for the last time, she felt a deep ache in her chest. But if anything went to plan, she might still come out on top.

The Hyperion started talking to Dakota even as she and Josef were making their way towards Black Rock’s private docking area. It began as a gentle buzz in the background of her thoughts-like hearing an auditorium filling up from down the far end of a corridor. But before long a familiar flood of information descended on her, every scrap of data demanding equal attention: hull stresses, systems integration failures, and a seemingly infinite queue of process queries.

Her Ghost handled this onslaught with practised ease, bringing to her conscious attention only those items that were most genuinely urgent. Although she didn’t yet have physical control over the Freehold ship, it felt a little like slipping on unfamiliar clothes that then grew more comfortable with every passing moment.

She focused her attention on the Hyperion’s cargo hold, but the fresh map data she uploaded from the frigate became blurry once she tried to see what was carried within it.

She realized Josef was saying something to her.

‘… all the security and guidance systems remain in lockdown until you’re ready to take the helm. The passengers themselves will be telling you where to go, but you-Mala Oorthaus, that is-will still have the usual legal right of override. So if they order you to dive into the atmosphere of a star, you can stick them in the brig and still get paid. That kind of thing.’

‘But dumping them into space as soon as we get there and lighting off on my own isn’t approved behaviour, either?’

Josef grinned, but Dakota was pleased to see an edge of nervousness there too.

‘Everything I need is right here.’ She indicated a small bag by her foot.

Josef shrugged gamely as they arrived at the mass transit elevators leading down to the docks. ‘Guess this is it, Dakota,’ he said, coming to a halt. ‘Anything else you need to know?’

Dakota stretched languorously, tired after her long bout of reprogramming the Piri Reis, and enjoyed the way Josef’s eyes took in the shape of her under her clothes.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘What are the chances of them figuring out who I really am?’

Josef smiled reassuringly. ‘Your identity is secure, I can assure you.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m glad you’ve helped me, when I really don’t think you needed to’-Josef started to speak, but she put up a hand to shush him-‘but the Freehold hiring a machine-head for any reason at all kind of stretches credulity, doesn’t it?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I’m saying perhaps they’re holding something back, something they’re not mentioning. I’ve seen these people in action, Josef. They’d rather go down in flames than face the dishonour of using someone like me as an ally, even as a paid ally.’

‘Look, all I know is that careful enquiries were being made about machine-head pilots, starting maybe a few weeks ago. Not through official channels, obviously. Then you came along looking for a way out, and it just seemed’-he shrugged heavily-‘fortuitous, I guess. Outside of Gardner and the people on board that ship, nobody but me knows about you. That’s all that matters.’

‘Thank you.’

She glanced at him and saw a tiny pinprick of light appear, somewhere above his left shoulder, just on the edge of her perception.

Piri, run a scan on my implants. I’m getting some very minor visual distortions showing up-like a spark of light.

‹Your Ghost systems are running at optimal, Dakota, but I will be vigilant.›

Thank you.

She had the overwhelming sensation there was some kind of unfinished business she still had to take care of, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.

A little while later, just as she was about to board the shuttle that would take her to the Hyperion, it came to her.

Things didn’t look much better inside the Hyperion than they had from the outside.

The frigate was a dart-shaped missile more than a thousand metres in length that flared out to the aft, where a fusion propulsion system powerful enough to push it across a solar system in no more than a few days of heavy acceleration was located. A heavily armoured gravity ring, where the command bridge was located, slowly revolved towards the ship’s fore. Yet there were museum pieces docked in some of the Consortium’s grandest orbital cities at Tau Ceti that looked in better shape than the Hyperion did.

Every few minutes a fresh cascade of systems-failure notifications came crashing down into Dakota’s thoughts like an all-consuming tidal wave of information, before being near-instantaneously tidied away by her Ghost, and becoming once again reduced to little more than a vaguely distracting background hum tinged with the machine equivalent of hysteria. It was easy to picture the Hyperion as a wounded dog howling its distress through a broad-spectrum network.

‘Quarters,’ Dakota-who was now Mala-muttered out loud, hanging on to a rung at the junction of two of the Hyperion’s access corridors, one of which plummeted away into what would have been terrifying depths if there had been any gravity present in this part of the ship. There was a barely perceptible-and therefore worrying-pause before glittering icons appeared in Dakota’s vision, leading the way.

If the ship had been up to date, finding her way around it would have been second nature: with the information already uploaded into her back-brain, it would feel as if she had been finding her way around the Hyperion for decades. As it was, too many data systems were either damaged or corrupted through lack of maintenance. Even the icon-projections reminded her just how old this frigate was.

‘Bridge,’ she said next.

In response, the first set of icons vanished, to be replaced by another.

She sighed. This was still better than nothing. She pushed herself forward, floating along a corridor, and watching the icons flicker into a new configuration as she came to a y-junction.

Halfway to the command bridge, her Ghost allowed Dakota to sense the presence of several people up ahead. Her employers.

Initially, Lucas Corso wasn’t sure what to make of the woman as she entered the bridge for the first time. Short dark hair curled around her ears. Her face was small and round, her frame slight and gamine. This is what the Freehold are meant to be scared of?

Perversely, he was nonetheless relieved to see her. He didn’t enjoy spending any more time in the company of Senator Arbenz and his cronies than he absolutely had to, but the request for his presence on the bridge had been unambiguous.

With any luck, this would be over quickly, and then he could return to the safety of his research, as far from the Senator as possible.

He glanced over at a bank of dataflow indicators and was shocked to realize how much information was passing between this initially unremarkable-looking woman and the Hyperion, as if she were a black hole drifting through the digital corona of the frigate’s star, bending and warping computer systems to her will.

‘Miss Oorthaus.’ Gardner guided the machine-head woman towards Senator Arbenz.

All Corso knew about Gardner came from random snatches of overheard conversation, most frequently between Arbenz and Gardner himself, but also from casual jokes and disparaging comments shared between Arbenz and his two bodyguards, the brothers Kieran and Udo Mansell. From this it was clear neither the Senator nor the two brothers had much respect for David Gardner: he was an outsider, not part of the Freehold, a resident of the old, impure world the Freehold were supposed to have left behind and which had resolutely failed to destroy itself in the centuries since. Gardner, then, was a necessary evil, as much as the machine-head woman-a businessman, free of honour and morality, but able to part-finance such an enormous undertaking as a planetary survey.

Oorthaus’s expression remained wary as she came face to face with Arbenz, like she was expecting something to rear up and bite her. After only a few weeks on board with only the two Mansells for company, Corso could hardly blame her.

Gardner directed her towards the Senator. ‘This is Senator Arbenz,’ Gardner continued. ‘The man in charge of this operation. I-’

‘You may call me Gregor,’ Arbenz offered, cutting him off. ‘I’m glad you could join us on our little adventure.’ Grasping both her hands with his own, Arbenz smiled, for all the world like a kindly uncle welcoming a long-lost niece.

Oorthaus nodded politely, although her stiff smile made it clear she felt less than comfortable. Corso had to suppress a smile creeping up one side of his face: the newcomer clearly had good survival instincts.

‘I know it must have been a hard decision for you, in agreeing to work with Freeholders,’ Arbenz continued smoothly. The two Mansell brothers watched, stony-faced, with arms folded. Corso had a pretty good idea of the thoughts going through their heads, and if Arbenz had any sense, he’d keep them and Oorthaus apart. ‘But I gather you weren’t a part of what happened on Redstone.’

‘No, I can be grateful for that.’

‘Yet here you are,’ Arbenz continued, ‘a machine-head again. Forgive me, but I must ask, was it really so terrible losing those head-implants the first time round?’

She hesitated a moment. ‘I…’As she looked around, Corso had the sense she hadn’t spent a lot of time around other people. ‘It was difficult, yes. A lot of machine-heads…’ She paused and shook her head.

‘Committed suicide?’ Udo Mansell supplied in a deep rumble. An awkward silence followed. Out of sight of the woman, Gardner shot the two bodyguards an angry glance.

Arbenz turned to the two men. ‘Udo, Kieran, I want you to double-check those inventories. I’ll see you later.’

As the two men left, Corso felt himself relax a little. ‘I’m sorry about that, Miss Oorthaus, but the brothers lost family during the war.’

‘That’s OK,’ Oorthaus replied. ‘As long as they don’t try to get in my way.’

Arbenz smiled as if appreciating a point well made. ‘They won’t, of course, but they’re here as shipboard security, so you’ll be expected to work with them.’

‘Look, Senator-’

‘Gregor, please.’

‘Senator Arbenz, do you want me to do this job or not? If I have to deal with people hostile towards me because of what I am, that’s going to compromise the safety of your ship and of your expedition.’

‘Mr Gardner’-Corso noticed, as he spoke, how the Senator briefly caught the other man’s eye-‘has a longstanding relationship with Josef Marados. I trust David Gardner, he trusts Josef, and Josef in turn trusts you. You, therefore, can also trust me. Udo and Kieran work for me, and they won’t do anything to compromise the survey. A large part of the Freehold’s remaining funds will go towards paying the Shoal a truly exorbitant price in exchange for taking one of their coreships on a detour in order to drop us off at this new system. You can imagine how eager we are to get this just right.’

‘But the way Josef put it,’ Oorthaus continued, ‘you stand to become very, very rich if and when the Shoal make this new system a permanent part of one of the new cross-galactic trade routes they’re planning for their coreships.’ She made a pretence of thinking hard for a moment. ‘Are you sure you’re paying me enough?’ Again, Corso had to struggle not to grin openly.

‹Investigating local systems,› the Piri Reis whispered in her ear.

Just hearing her craft’s familiar machine tones made Dakota feel more secure.

She was alone on the Hyperion’s bridge, surrounded by the lotus-like petals of the interface chair. Once inside the chair, she was blind, deaf and dumb in terms of her normal senses, but the Hyperion constantly funnelled a torrent of information into her mind via her Ghost. She ‘saw’ the holos and viewscreens around the bridge spiking bright white, one after the other, as the Piri Reis simultaneously and covertly ransacked the frigate’s data stacks.

How long till we rendezvous with the coreship?

‹Locating,› Piri replied. ‹Signature brane topology distortions indicate it has just re-emerged from transluminal space. Estimated time of rendezvous between three and five hours.›

After she’d had her new Ghost implants installed, Dakota had spent a year serving aboard a coreship very like the one they were now approaching. There were entire branches of human science devoted to studying the vast spacecraft despite the Shoal’s strict limitations on such observations. Tiny probes would scan their drive spines, measuring and recording the exotic energies the coreships left in their wake, across every possible wavelength and spectrum. These Shoal craft truly were worlds unto themselves, enormous environments in which a dozen different species could be contained at once, yet kept entirely separate in their own carefully constructed habitats.

‹I am now fully integrated with local systems,› Piri reported. ‹Currently investigating prior software alterations and other data relevant to navigation and security. ›

How many people are currently on board the Hyperion? Dakota asked.

‹Six, present company included. Records indicate that a crew of similar number are remaining behind at Mesa Verde, after travelling here on board. ›

We’re going to have to find a vacant slot to put you in.

And, she wondered, could she really be sure of stowing her ship in the cargo bay without anyone finding it?

Piri, have you managed to scan the current contents of the cargo bay yet?

‹Yes. It primarily consists of short-range manned rovers, weapon-equipped surface-to-orbit two-person scooters and emergency vehicles, plus standard exploration and survival gear for planetary exploration as listed on the current manifest. There are also approximately three thousand remote-analysis drones developed by Black Rock Industries for detection of exploitable interplanetary resources.›

Meaning asteroids, Dakota concluded.

‹Some other items will require potentially risky work on their encryption systems before their exact nature can be determined. The encryption methods, however, imply a military origin.›

Then make sure your encryption is even better, and find yourself a good hiding place while you’re at it.

Dakota’s next stop was the airlock complex located towards the aft. As she crossed the Hyperion, her Ghost generated a mental image of the coreship with which they would be rendezvousing. Intense bursts of radiation indicated where the alien craft had emerged outside of Neptune’s orbit, signifying a mortal clash between normal space-time and the complex multi-brane spatial geometries the craft was believed to generate in order to jump across light years.

Dakota entered an airlock and shed all her clothes, placing them in a satchel before slinging it over her bare shoulders. Her filmsuit then emerged and coated her flesh. Once it had sealed her lungs, anus, vagina and nasal cavities, she began to run the depressurization cycle. A few moments later a deep silence fell, then the external door swung open to reveal the vast emptiness beyond the Hyperion’s hull.

Protective molecular niters formed themselves out of the filmsuit and coalesced over her irises, momentarily magnifying the distant bright mass of faraway Mesa Verde until surface details stood out in near-hallucinatory detail before they balanced out. The stars looked like a fine dusting of diamonds across the universe.

Dakota took a firm hold on an exterior rung and swung herself out and onto the surface of the hull itself. She pushed herself off, glimpsing the airlock door silently cycle shut once more. Floating free of the Hyperion, she began moving further and further away with every passing second.

When she was thirty or forty metres distant, Dakota reached inside her satchel and withdrew a kinetic pistol, taking care to wrap a thick cable that extruded from its grip around both of her wrists.

Ready, she informed Piri.

She then aimed the pistol towards the behemoth bulk of the frigate, both hands firm on its grip. Several seconds passed in silence.

‹On my count…› Piri began counting down from five. ‹Now.›

She squeezed the trigger. The pistol jerked in her grip, and bright flame jetted from its wide nozzle. Suddenly the Hyperion started to move away at an increasing rate.

OK. Did anybody pick that up?

‹Three automatic traffic sensors in orbit around Mesa Verde detected the flare.›

What about the Hyperion?

‹The Hyperion’s external sensors remained locked down and blind, as expected, at the time the pistol was fired. The ship’s main systems have so far failed to recognize any discrepancies. I am now thirty kilometres away and accelerating to match velocity. Estimated arrival is in approximately twelve minutes.›

What does the Hyperion think you are? Dakota queried.

‹An automated refuelling pod registered to Black Rock Ore. There is some risk in this strategy-›

I’m aware of that.

Dakota waited several long, tense minutes until she picked out a course-correction flare from the approaching Piri Reis, stars winking out of view as they were occluded by its dark bulk. Dakota herself was now some distance from the Hyperion, moving towards the rendezvous point with her old ship.

The Piri made its final velocity-matching corrections: now it was moving at exactly the same speed as the Hyperion, both craft thereby appearing stationary in relation to each other. Dakota then boosted herself over to the Piri’s airlock.

Information flowed in a cascade between Dakota and the two ships, the murmur of data transfer like a distant waterfall in her thoughts, but one where she could still pick out the sound of every droplet as it tumbled.

A fat chunk of her initial payment from the Freehold had gone into reacquiring the Piri from the salvage firm it had been sold to, and then paying the necessary bribes to make sure the transaction stayed off the official records. The counter-intelligence ordnance on board the Piri Reis being superior to the sum total carried by the Hyperion, the Piri Reis was to all intents and purposes invisible, slipping past the Freehold ship’s detection systems like an unseen wraith passing through a wall.

Dakota swam into the heart of the Piri Reis, the lights low and the air warm.

Take us in, Piri.

Heavy doors rumbled apart just fore of the Hyperion’s engines. The Piri Reis slipped through them like a minnow catching a ride in a whale’s belly.

From the inside, the cargo bay area formed a hexagonal tube extending almost a third of the way into the hull’s interior. Shield generators and massive docking frames of strengthened alloy were arrayed at regular spaces, half of them already occupied by equipment crates. The Piri Reis manoeuvred itself into an empty slot and field generators flickered on automatically, binding it against the cargo bay’s interior wall.

Dakota waited. She really expected alarms and flashing lights, but there was only empty silence.

Reactivating her filmsuit, she exited her ship again, and entered the depressurized space of the cargo bay. Her implants meanwhile twisted the data topography of the Hyperion’s surveillance systems into knots, rendering her undetectable to any cameras or detection systems. She next floated into an airlock, letting her filmsuit evaporate before unslinging the satchel and hurriedly pulling her clothes out of it, as soon as the airlock had repressurized.

A few moments later there was a ping, and a door swung open to reveal a corridor with signs pointing towards the engine maintenance systems. Inhaling deeply, she pulled her now empty satchel back over her shoulder and stepped out into the corridor.

Against all rationality, she’d almost convinced herself someone would be waiting for her there. Surely someone must have spotted her, and would have figured out what she was up to. Instead it looked like she was completely alone.

Dakota leant her forehead against the cool metal of the wall and forced herself to relax, taking slow, deep breaths. She started to laugh, but it came out more like a half-sob. She was clearly letting her worst fears get to her.